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Big Elmer's View From the Porch
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December 2006 Now, you are going to say, “Well of course you think this way! You own a freakin’ small store!” But hear me out here! I’ve been doing some reading, some listening and some lecture-attending and I’ve found a few things out. Way back before Elmer’s was even a gleam in my entrepreneurial eye, I used to wonder if it was just my reactionary imagination, or were the downtowns of small communities disappearing in the wakes of the large, one-stop shopping big box stores? In the recent studying up on things I’ve been doing, I have learned: From every dollar spent at a business that is based some place else, 13% of that dollar stays in town and 87% of it goes back to the home state of that store. From every dollar spent at a local store or restaurant, 45% of the dollar stays in the community. Considering how much merchandise we at Elmer’s, Neighbors and Ashfield Hardware try to stock from local farmers, craftsmen and producers, I’ll bet the percentage of money that stays in our community is even higher than 45 percent. When you shop at Elmer’s or Neighbors or the Ashfield Hardware Store, we use your money to 1. Buy from local farmers, growers and product manufacturers 2. Eat at the Lakehouse and Country Pie, further supporting local workers who don’t even work for us 3. Hire local, independent carpenters, plumbers and electricians who further support local supply houses 4. Pay Ashfield property taxes and water bills which helps all of us to have services and water. 5. And more stuff that I haven’t even thought of yet. We even shop from each other, which keeps the money even closer to us in an expanding sort of way. “But Wal-mart is so cheap!” I hear you say. “How do you argue with that?” Well sir, I’m going to talk about quality of merchandise, integrity of shop owners, a small-town way of life and the big picture of where the money needs to stay in order for a small town to prosper. We here at Elmer’s, Neighbors and the Hardware Store have to live with our business decisions. If we were to try to sell you crap, we would still have to look you in the eye every day when we see you on the street. It is in our strongest interest to sell you quality food and merchandise, order what you want to buy and to keep you happy. Those Who Will Never See You Again and who have millions of customers from all over the country may not care so much about one town’s immediate needs. From a social and soul-enlivening point of view, shopping local keeps choices available. I, myself kind of love that going to the hardware store takes me an extra fifteen minutes because I have to see what new ice cream flavors are available, pet the cat, discuss politics with Nancy, speak French with Laura, visit with Ruth and Clayton by the fire, play with the new toys, meet and hire someone who’s looking for a job, find the perfect door pull I’m looking for, put the door pull on Elmer’s tab and then go next door for a slice of pizza and a discussion of musical theater with Patrick. See, you don’t get that at Wal-mart because they don’t have cats to pet. Nor do they have Ruth and Clayton nor time to talk, nor a fireplace, nor an opinion on either local politics or musical theater. They may have pizza and door pulls, but the pizza comes from Frozen and the door pulls are all the way in the back and no one working there knows anything about them. Between the door pulls and the door itself lies miles of stuff I don’t need or necessarily want, but which will call my name and I will spend $200 dollars on my credit card that will ultimately cost me $400 with interest for a $9 door pull. (Plus gas.) Small-time local stores have a hard time competing with the lure of “cheap prices.” We can’t order the quantity that the large stores do and so we don’t get the cheapest prices the way the huge guys do. But if you pass the small-time stores up they will go out of business and all that will be available will be the big, impersonal CMIOSISOS and everyone will talk about the good old days when we had local grocery stores, hardware stores and restaurants where everyone knew your name. I am not saying that one should never shop at Wal-mart or Target; I, myself have been known to spend many hundreds of dollars in a single shopping trip at Target. But only recently did I realize that for every hundred dollars I left at Target, thirteen dollars stayed in my community, while eighty-seven dollars flew off to Minneapolis! Now, some of my favorite cooks and coffee-servers come from Minneapolis, but I have to pay them here in Massachusetts! Better I should shop at Wilson’s and keep the money circulating in the towns I love best! “But we have only a few stores here in Ashfield!” I hear you saying. (You and I have long conversations when you’re not even with me!) And indeed, Grasshopper, that is true! But we do have Wilson’s in Greenfield. “But Wilson’s is so expensive!” you say, biting into a banana. “Then you do not go to Wilson’s often enough!” I say back, wondering where you got that banana, because I want one too. Wilson’s is continually having in-house sales—really, really good sales that make their merchandise infinitely affordable to the common man. “But Wilson’s has stuff for my grandma—I want hip clothing!” You retort, with your mouth full. “Indeed, once again, you are not looking, Grasshopper!” I reply, frowning at your bad table manners. I buy many, many clothes at Wilson’s, clothing which is often praised by others, to which I always say, “I got it at Wilson’s!” And you always say, “I didn’t know Wilson’s had stuff like that!” But they do! And they, like Elmer’s want very much to hear from you about what kinds of things you want to buy. Wilson’s is the last of its kind—an independent, non-chain, family-run department store. Wilson’s is the real thing. It’s what other stores in America spend millions trying to be: authentic. It’s a national treasure! If we don’t shop there and if it closes, all the preservationists among us will wail and weep and lament the loss of the store we used to go to as kids. ------Hey! We could shop there, keep it open and keep our money in our community! We have power! Small towns around the rest of the country are rapidly becoming mere bedroom communities to the bigger cities because they have no Local Stores of their own. We are so very, very lucky here to have our small-time stores and restaurants. It’s part of what keeps Western Massachusetts interesting. If you have no interest in any of this and feel it’s just a dog-eat-dog world and you can’t stop progress, then, well, okay. I’m not trying to convince you to completely stop shopping at the big box stores; I’m trying to present the reality of community and what happens when people abandon it. “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!” you exclaim, “This isn’t a funny column at all!” To which I say, “The part about the banana was funny! The rest of it is very serious!” Keep us all vibrant by shopping the small and independent stores of Ashfield, Shelburne Falls, Greenfield and surrounding areas first, and if you can’t find what you need, branch out. And just do a little research on the subject of the Small-Mart revolution. It gets into all kinds of deeper issues like how shopping locally keeps food safer (buying local beef and chickens helps guard against meat carrying Mad-cow disease and avian flu) and how de-centralizing production keeps us safer in times of 9/11 types of crises. It’s really kind of exciting to know that we can take all of this back into our own hands! Which brings us back to: “Of course you think this way! You own a freakin’ small store!” And it’s a small, local store whose sole focus is on the needs and wants of one particular small community . . . You know, you don’t get that just everywhere. |
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November 2006 So, what I want to know is, who the heck do I think I am? First I waltz into town and buy the local general store and turn it into a breakfast restaurant. Then I start filling the shelves with natural-food type groceries when only half the town is the certified Earthy-Crunchy sort. And there’s already a grocery store in town, anyway. And two restaurants. Then I open up an art gallery in the side room of Elmer’s. With about 5 and a half public shops in town, one of them is now a freakin’ local crafts art gallery. Then I start bossing the local chickens around and demanding they lay more eggs. (None of which, I would like to mention have paid any attention with the exception of Willie Gray’s chickens who weren’t here to read the original demands and so they don’t know they’re supposed to be Questioning Authority like the rest of the chickens in this town who are so proudly and defiantly now refusing to lay a single egg.) And now? And now, after ONE YEAR in town I sign up to be on the Visioning Committee? Whose vision would this be? Mine? After ONE YEAR in town? Oh yeah! And then my brother and I bought an extra house—one more than I actually need to live in! On Main Street! I said it was because my parents were moving here, and then they didn’t even move! What I am doing? Buying up the whole dang town? It’s not even that big a town! Do I think we just have extra houses lying around everywhere? Well, we don’t! So then I went and joined the Visioning Committee to add my voice to what I think Ashfield should look like. And I’m saying things like, “I really like Ashfield the way it is now. I don’t want it to change.” I ask you again, who the heck do I think I am??? I don’t want the town to change, but I added Peggy to the population; Peggy, who cares so much about Her Elmer’s Early Morning People that she is insisting on keeping Elmer’s open Thanksgiving morning so that people can buy their last minute groceries—after I told her I thought we should close for that day. (Peggy, along with the chickens apparently also questions authority, siding with Ashfield Thanksgiving Day cooks over me, the very voice of authority.) I invited Tracy and Donnie up from New Orleans after the hurricane and now Rob has come to work at Elmer’s from Minnesota with 3 years of experience in coffee-drink making so that he now he has Latte Groupies hanging around the place. What do I mean I don’t want Ashfield to change? Who ever heard of Lattes in Ashield? I don’t know what to think about this. About who, exactly I think I am and what I am up to. It’s all very upsetting. All right, here’s what I think. I think I just like being part of a real community. I think it turns out I like waiting on people and making them happy by bringing them more coffee. (Who would have thought?) I think my parents went back home and realized they had actually seen Paradise in the form of a Hilltown and now, in fact have decided (just this afternoon) that they do want to move here. I think I love watching the sun rise between Nye’s and Fessenden’s barns and watching it set behind the mountain at the other end of the street. I love waking up at night and seeing actual stars outside my very window, just like in a kid’s picture book. I like pizza from Country Pie, eating on the deck at the Lake House and having lunch with Sally Straus at Neighbor’s counter. I like knowing all the people who come in. So, I think I know what the heck I’m up to. I’m just having a wonderful time and hope to heck it’s working out for all y’all, too. I just wish I knew how to control chickens. Then I could actually get something done. |
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October 2006 About 10 years ago I worked for Jimmy Buffett (of the song, “Margaritaville” fame.) My job was to decorate the venues where he was giving concerts. For a few years I only worked on his large-stadium concerts, but in 1995 he hired me to do his entire tour. Now, I have always had what I considered to be fun ideas, but never in my life had I found anyone who, when I said, “Hey! I know what we should do . . . !” replied, “Okay!” until I went on tour with Jimmy and met his costume designer, Helen Hiatt. Helen had worked for Jimmy, for Janet Jackson, for Prince, for Paula Abdul and Helen wasn’t scared of anything, so when I said, “I know, we should dress up in goofy costumes and dance as backup girly dancers for Jimmy’s pre-show guitar contest!” Helen said, “Okay!” and designed our costumes. In the pre-concert competition, nervous, star-struck contestants were supposed to play Jimmy’s song “Cheeseburger in Paradise” on the guitar for a chance to win a new guitar autographed by Jimmy, and, in order to ease their nerves, see, Helen and I imitated Jimmy’s real back-up singers, dressed in aprons, hats that looked like whole cheeseburgers, and sunglasses with big fat cigars clenched between our teeth. And, since neither of us could really sing or dance, it was even funnier! Long story short, Helen got to keep her job and I got put in Time Out. When my sister and I were little, I was always trying to convince her that we should do fun things like putting marbles in our ears and she was always saying pedestrian things like, “I don’t think we should do that.” By the time we got into high school I called her (in a MOST mocking fashion) “Saint Chris” because she never got into trouble whereas I got frequently grounded (which, for you youngsters is what we used to call Time Out in the seventies.) Even in New Orleans, a city famous for its outlandishness, I had a hard time convincing people to go along with my ideas. Even Tracy Cameron, who is truly fearless (and who now lives in Ashfield) was frequently overheard bellowing at me, “Are you insane???” I used to wonder, “Where are my people? I think they should have a convention for my people, where ever they are.” I didn’t exactly know who my people were, but I thought I would recognize them if I saw them. Maybe. And then I came to Ashfield. On September 9th we held a dance in the street outside Elmer’s and 250 showed up and danced like crazy until the eleven o’clock sound curfew! We had the Shea Swing Orchestra’s Big Band of nine musicians and a singer and they played live and in person, old (very old!) favorites like “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “In the Mood,” and we danced and swang and jitterbugged and Lindy Hopped and pulled our arms out of joint and fell down and just had a grand old time! We had babies, Baby-Boomers, teen-agers, 30-somethings and 80-somethings. We had people dress up and people dress down. Some danced very, very well and others of us just danced for dancing’s sake. Thanks to the fun-hearted police and the Select Board we were able to close off a section of Norton Hill Road just outside the store, and those folks were there too, just a-dancing away. People you would never have thought you’d see dancing were there! And were dancing together! Somewhere about ten o’clock someone asked me for the fifty-eleventh time, “How did you know this would work?” and it crept into my head, the big, fat recognition that: I have found my people! And we play very well together! So! If any of you have any ideas, you just come over to Elmer’s House of Happenings and let me know what you’re thinking. In fact, the idea for the Big Band Dance came from former Police Chief Walter Zalenski who told me that they used to have dances in Town Hall back in the 1930s and 40s and about how much fun they were. I think you have ideas. And I think you should step up with them. Because, see, if we end up in Time Out, well, we’ll all end up there together and that may closely resemble a convention of similar-thinking people who know how to have a good time! |
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September 2006 An open letter to the chickens of Ashfield, Buckland, Conway and Goshen: Dear Chickens, We need eggs. Now I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no eggs, and I believe I am talking to the girl-type chickens out there, but you roosters gather around too, just in case you have something to do with this whole egg-producing business. Geese, ducks; you lean in here too. Ostriches? Llamas? Whatever. Soldiers, we need eggs. We are all stove up over here at Elmer’s Local Egg and Waffle Emporium, and you, chickens, you are now the hold up. First it was the blueberry pancakes. Blueberries in the pancakes were taking too long to cook so we took the blueberries out of the cakes and sauteed them into a sauce on top, which made the blueberry pancakes come out of the kitchen 89 percent faster than they had before. Then it was the waitress situation. As we welcomed more and more weekend-breakfast-eaters our one (dear) weekend waitress had an increasingly difficult time keeping up with the fast paced orders and checks for people to eat in and get out in a timely fashion. So we hired a second waitress for the weekend days, gave each waitress one half of the restaurant and we were able to step up to a lively breakfast production once again. Everything was zipping along like buttered pancakes sliding off a warm plate when all of a sudden it appears that you feathered foot-soldiers in the Breakfast Egg Corps have gone on strike. ”My chickens just aren’t laying right now,” is what all the chicken farmers are saying, “It’s the change in the weather.” Soldiers, let me tell you something: These Western Massachushuns are some egg-eating sons of fishes and we at Elmer’s Overwhelmed Breakfast Boutique have no time for moody chickens! It used to be that we could stock up with 30 dozen eggs on a Friday morning and be good to go all the way to Monday. Now we get our 30 dozen in and by Saturday afternoon I’m calling farmers all over the quadri-town area looking for chickens to step up to the team plate and act right! Push, darlins’, push. I lay awake thinking last night and it seems to me that if I started with your little chicken shoulders and gently massaged all the way down your little feathered bodies we could squeeze some eggs out, couldn’t we? I mean, how hard can it be to make an egg if you’re a chicken? Aren’t chickens supposed to be smart? I saw Chicken Run! I know what you can do! If you are capable of plotting a farm insurrection and offing the farm manager and his wife, then surely you can squeeze me out a measly couple of dozen eggs or so each afternoon, can’t you! What is it you want? What is your incentive? Money? Cigarettes? Health insurance? What? I’m sure there’s something we can work out with you! Soldiers, this is your call to arms. I need eggs and I need them now. Elmer’s serves fresh local eggs and you are the log jam in that plan. Now. Sit back, do some yoga, breathe and think deeply. Repeat after me: Empty nest bad; full nest good! Eggs are good for children and other living things. I think I can! I think I can! Can we do it? YES WE CAN!! Little children are depending on you. Do it for the children. Come on. It’s nearly fall. Get all cozy in your nests with some hot chocolate maybe, read a little feel-good material, “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” or something—oh don’t be so sensitive! Put some Barry Manilow on the stereo and well, you know what to do! Don’t you? Don’t you? Turn on some old Loony Tunes cartoons where the chickens instantly lay so many eggs that they are forced upwards to the ceiling on the mound of eggs. THAT’S what we’re looking for! That’s it! Remember chickens, we are all in this together. Only you can prevent empty breakfast plates. Give us a dozen for the gipper. Think of the starving children in China. Whatever it takes! You know what I mean! This is biology! It’s animal husbandry! It’s freakin’ nature! Thank you for your time and eggs and I was just kidding about the “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” Love, Big Elmer |
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August 2006 So there we were: I was giddy back from the depths of despair in New Orleans, Elmer’s had a booth at the joyously fun Green River Festival, breakfast was a-hoppin’, and the days in Ashfield were a glorious color, temperature and humidity-level. And then Kara went out of town. Somehow after five weeks of working from 5 am to 8 pm seven days a week (‘til eleven on weekends) and after steering the unwieldy ship of breakfast into port all by herself, she took to the notion that she was due a 10 day break. Not my idea, but one that I just couldn’t shake her loose of. So she crammed five weeks of how-to in a day and a half and then took off. Just took off, leaving me with all the kids, the dog, the leaky roof, the finicky washing machine and the door-to-door salesmen, and traipsed off to someplace called “Vermont.” On the first day Kara left me we had a Jazz Band and Singer that drew hoards of people with lawn chairs all wanting the strawberry shortcake and smoothie desserts we had advertised. Geez! What do they think this is? Lydia and I were busier than a one-armed paper-hanger trying to get all those treats made (well, I was—Lydia didn’t seem to be scared) and half-way through my first smoothie the blender blew up sending smoothie to the heavens and I let out an un-Christian word and had to apologize to whoever in the long line of Jazz fans was listening, including five year-old Mac, who fortunately, with his mouth full of noisy Pop Rocks candy, apparently heard neither the word nor the apology. On the Second Day Kara left me we had a Saturday morning which means lots of people for breakfast and—wait lots more people for breakfast – oh my word, how many people want to eat breakfast in this world? Apparently breakfast is a popular sport in this part of the country and the featured event seems to be Blueberry Pancake Eating. Blueberry Pancakes (now this is a scientific fact) take 3 times longer than regular pancakes do to cook because of all the added moisture in those plumb blue little piggies and (another scientific fact) if you put 10 blueberry pancakes on the griddle at one time you might as well go fishing while they cook because they take hours. So people waited, and they waited and the sit-down list got longer and longer and the people waited longer and longer for their food and some people got a little upset (and who could blame them, certainly none of us did) and finally noon came and we stopped putting people on the waiting list and that was a blessed relief! On the Third Day Kara left me we figured out that we could make a nice fresh-blueberry sauce to put on top of the pancakes which cut down the waiting time by two-thirds (scientific fact) and so we were able to serve a record ONE HUNDRED and FOURTEEN people breakfast with much less wait and a good time was had by all but my feet who hurt, hurt, hurt but that, I understand is the price of doing business. On the Fourth Day Kara left me I had to place orders. Simple enough at first and then at second and then at third and by the hundred-and-sixty-third time I had to call the same company back again to say, “I forgot the fifty pounds of potatoes! Sorry! I won’t call back again! I promise!” the joy was gone. On the Fifth Day Kara left me the espresso machine overflowed its banks like the Mighty Mississippi and the water that was to drain into the little hole below did not and drained instead into the counter and the floor and underneath things. Fortunately I was able to call upon my good friend Tracy from across the street who had renovated three houses in New Orleans doing all the plumbing herself and I held her new baby while she fixed the drain. And the baby only screamed for a little while and only threw up on me several times. But that was better than having the staff fall down in coffee sludge until Kara got back and told me who to call to fix the drain. And now I believe we’re on about the sixth day or so since Kara left me and I haven’t heard a word from her. Right—when I was out of town and she was working I heard from her on a regular basis! But now that she’s out of town, does she call? Does she write? No. I don’t believe she cares that it is 5:30 in the morning and I am up writing little fliers for our Irish Music Session this weekend that I should have done last Monday but I was busy! What was I doing last Monday? Oh right—orders--OH MY LORD I HAVEN’T MADE ANY BANK DEPOSITS YET THIS WEEK! AND IT’S PAYDAY! If you see Kara or Peggy or Ben or Mary or Jim or Risa or Sam or Jade or Lydia, give them big hugs and kisses for all that they do because that is one hard-working bunch of people! -–And if you could lend them a couple of bucks until I have time to get to the bank, we’d all appreciate that too. |
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July 2006 So now I’m in Anti-Ashfieldland: Houston, Texas where everything is big, wide, hot and strip-mallish. Back before the Hurricane (the Big One of Ought-Five) I used to work on festivals. Since the Big One came as a Big Surprise, I maintained those contracts for this year, anyway and that’s how I come to be working on a large festival in Houston, Texas in July when I really would prefer to be serving waffles at Elmer’s in a town where one can actually enjoy the outdoors during the summer months! Before I was in Houston I was in New Orleans for three weeks building the festival. This annual festival is held at the Super Dome and the Convention Center in New Orleans, but as the world might suppose after what they saw last September, neither building is ready to host a large happy gathering of people yet. The old song asks, “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?” and certainly, New Orleanians do. I, coming from lovely Ashfield still have survivor guilt among my friends who have been there since they were allowed to return last fall. The mail service still doesn’t work. Trash pickup by the city is only sporadic and the city just had to extend the federal trash pick-up program again this week. Garbage and house-guts blow around most streets as the people who are just now coming back after the end of the school year begin work on their wrecked houses. It’s hard to live in New Orleans. It wears you out. Most of the other New Orleanians who work on this festival are rather delighted to be out of the city, just because everything works in Houston. Only a fraction of businesses and restaurants are open again in New Orleans, largely because there is no one in town to actually do work. French Quarter restaurants have split up their schedules: Some are only open for lunch now, the rest are only open for dinner as they concentrate their entire staffs on doing what they can do to stay open. The funny thing is that, had the hurricane not happened, I probably would have slowly moved from New Orleans to Ashfield. When I considered buying Elmer’s a year ago this month, I thought I would buy it as investment property and rent it to someone who knew what they were doing. I thought I might live back and forth for a time, renting out one or the other house as I lived around the country, ultimately, probably moving to Ashfield full time. The conflict has been created in me, however by the sight of my half-gap house; from about six feet and above, my house looks like it always did with the same wallpaper and even things on the shelves. From six feet down, however it ain’t nothing but open studs and nails as though a well-dressed person has suddenly had their pants yanked off and they’re running around in their skivvies. To sell that house now feels like I’m kicking New Orleans when she’s down; that I’m betraying an old friend. My friends there have been gracious, even envious about my move and are very interested in my new life Up North, but they beg me not to sell. “We need people like you!” they say; People with the means to rebuild I think they mean. New Orleans has so many problems; every day the headlines scream a new one: City’s Sewer System is Decimated New Flood Gates Inadvertently Put City At Risk Broken Water Pipes Costing the City 85 Million Gallons of Water per Day Small Customer Base Causes Energy Bills to Soar Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? I think we will never know the happy-go-lucky music-in-the-air city any of us ever loved. As my friend Tracy says, everyone there is broken now, and they are. You can see it in their faces even as their houses get back on their feet. What do you do? What do you do? You sit in a hotel in Houston and you know what it is to miss good old Ashfield. You decide to wait until after hurricane season, see what you think then about rebuilding a house in New Orleans and in the meantime you think about how to outfit the back half of your lovely little store in Western Massachusetts. When I settle down and listen to my heart of hearts it’s that little store that’s feeling most like Home. Thanks, y’all for a wonderful, magical first year. |
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June 2006 But you know, the funny thing is that I never in life wanted to own a restaurant. That’s what I remembered last Saturday afternoon sitting at Elmer’s window table listening to Kara say, “Nan, we’re out of food! Call for more eggs! We need potatoes! I’m going down to Greenfield to get what I can—you chop these onions—all these onions and I’ll be back as soon as I can!” But see, I never wanted to run a restaurant. I like restaurants because you can go to them and people take care of you. They bring you the things you like and if you don’t like them you leave a smaller tip. Restaurants represent relaxation and time with your friends. That’s what I like about restaurants. I had never looked at a restaurant beyond the décor—bad paint job, good paint job—and the food—good food, I’ll come here again!” I never noticed whether my wanting to sit at the largest table all by myself meant that the hostess wouldn’t be able to seat a party of 6. Restaurants were always there to entertain me—kind of like a hairdresser: for that hour it’s all about me! People taking care of me and doing it cheerfully! That’s what I like about restaurants! And now I had to chop onions? And my feet! My feet! Caning came to mind: the form of punishment in distant histories and countries where goons whack the bottoms of your bare feet with bamboo rods. That’s what my feet felt like. In my other life I work on festivals and films, where you have a job to do and you work 34 hours a day if need be to get it done. Now I had worked from 8 am to 10:30 am and felt like wet pasta. An eighteen hour festival day would be a vacation compared to this. And it was only the first day. The day had started out scarily enough: We had opened at 6 and no one had shown up until Mariel Kinsey, out walking her dog Sophie had noted all the eager Elmer’s employees waiting, waiting and so had taken pity and came inside for breakfast. We all cheered when she did and she declared she had never been greeted so well in a restaurant, ever. Well I knew how to greet people in a restaurant! This could be fun. The problem was that I didn’t know what to do after that. At one point Kara (who has, in fact worked in restaurants, so I thought she had an unfair advantage) whispered to me, “I’m not trying to admonish you, but when you seat people you should give them menus so they know what to order.” Right! Right! Menus! And coffee! Light or dark? One two-year old boy chirped, “Cuppa decaf please.” His parents looked so surprised I don’t think they were in the habit of serving him that. I didn’t either. Fortunately back in the fall I had had the insight to hire Lydia Sprague who has worked much in the restaurant trade and she knows all about coffee and food and the little abbreviations people write down so that the cook knows what she’s talking about. And somehow she and cook Mary Schjeldahl had worked out a plan so that Lydia brought great plates laden with eggs with big orange round yolks and lake-sized pancakes out from the kitchen. Waffles that looked like Christmas gifts and sausage, big happy sausages crowding to all hang on to the plate. And suddenly the people came. I think at first it was our friends, the good hangers-on who gained 25 pounds each over the winter supporting us in our Small-time Café buying our cookies and coffee cakes all winter long. Those were the first, but then they apparently said good things to their friends and those friends came and then their friends came and suddenly I was in the restaurant business scraping plates and putting them in a dishwasher that washes dishes in 180 seconds so that I then was setting tables again—and where does the fork go? Right. Left. Fork left, on the napkin? Lydia! But the cups! Did you see the cups? Dawn Fessenden made those cups and they are so perfectly formed and the colors are so bright and they are perfect—oh wait! A table must be cleared! That’s me! What do I do with these plates? I want to talk about the cups. That’s what I do. I see beauty. No, now I clean tables, too. Wash, rinse and sanitize the tables and then set them for new guests. Hello! Welcome to Elmer’s! Can I seat you here? Oh right, sorry—let me get you a menu! By Monday it was fun. That was when I knew I would live. By Monday morning I remembered (most) things and was able to do them (sort of) quickly. The goofy duck-shoes I got last summer became the only shoes I could actually put on my feet that allowed me forward mobility, but they did allow me to walk and talk all at the same time, so that was good. So look! Elmer’s has breakfast! Ta daa! We did it! A patron asked me what my business plan had been and I honestly answered that all I knew how to do was to hire good people who knew what they were doing. Me, I want to go back to talking about the coffee cups. And that is the absolute truth. At the risk of someone coming in to offer her more money elsewhere, I will publicly state that Kara Schnell is tirelessly amazing at what she does for Elmer’s. She’s training the help, (designing what it is the help do,) showing us all how to make Lattes and Espressos and things with that scary, steamy Espresso machine. (Did you see the pretty cups? Peggy—could you make this gentleman a cappuccino?) Kara is there all day and all night and she is great! (And if anyone should come and try to entice her with more money, remember that I have a scary steamy Espresso machine and I know how to use it.) Well, I don’t actually know how to use it for Espressos, but I know how to fend off predators with it. Meanwhile, the cups are gorgeous, the food is really, really, really good, the staff is cheerful and expert and I am working my way up to being the restaurant owner who sits at the bar and smokes big fat cigars and takes people skiing in Aspen on my private jet. Right? Right?? Isn’t that what owners do? Oh—Kara says they do that after they scrape the plates and load the dishwasher. –Oh no, I’m sorry, she said they do that after they clean the dishwasher. At least I own the pretty cups. |
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May 2006 I think there were people in town who kind of “blessed my heart” as we say in the south: people who smiled knowingly and nodded empathetically when I announced, “We’ll get this kitchen up and running and start serving breakfast by . . . “ Goodness knows what I said then: “Next week!” or something fierce like that. Those were people who had actually had professional kitchens put in their restaurants and knew that the lickety-split production schedule was in my head alone. Kitchens don’t get built in a week. Or a month. Or in four months. Maybe they do in . . . five? There are no fingers to point. Well, there are pointable fingers, but I like to use them to point out the marvelous work done on that kitchen and on Elmer’s as a whole! The floor, the walls, the sinks, the appliances; none of those were there in January and they look like they really belong there, now! The kitchen is a gorgeous room and I am so proud to be the mama of it. Outside too—new steps, new handrails, new railing down the ramp, all well-built and pretty. It kind of looks finished, but building a kitchen is a pile of sticks all resting upon each other. You can’t pick up the second one until the first one’s done and it takes a while to get all those sticks rounded up, as the guy with the top stick is stuck at another job and can’t get here until Wednesday. –Two weeks from now. But it’s coming and we are getting our menus ready, getting our plates counted, getting our suppliers stoked, getting our aprons on. We want to do it all just right—the building, the decoration, the choice of foods, the studied interest in suppliers and quality. We want Elmer’s Big Stuff Breakfast Joint to be a place worth returning to and so we want to get it right. –Which reminds me of something important here! Recently we had an undetected problem with the coffee maker. When we finally figured it out and fixed it, (thanks to the seven people one afternoon who complained of weak coffee) it turned out we had a multitude of friends who had noted the coffee being weak but “didn’t want to say anything.” Now friends, it does us no good whatsoever if you don’t say anything! If you don’t like something, you have to tell us so that we can fix it! We are all in this together! You are the customer and we are the seller. If you notice something isn’t right, you won’t buy it and we will wonder what happened. Was it something we said? Was it the way we dress? No! It was the broken coffee maker! So please let us know if our quality slips. We’re extremely proud of our quality. Our whole self-esteem is wrapped up in it! So that’s where we are. Getting new things in slowly, getting the kitchen done also kind of slowly, working on our quality. Thanks for your patience and your support. We hope you’ll find the end product worth the long wait. |
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April 2006 I understand that all good things come to those who wait. I don’t know why that should be, but the message helps now as I’m waiting on kitchen appliances that were supposed to be here several weeks ago; I hope they’re good ones, worth waiting for. We are in stuck-in-the-mud season right now at Elmer’s; so close to breakfast we can nearly smell the bacon in the air! Just waiting for the appliances to arrive in the proper size. So far all the ones that were sent were the wrong size and we had to send them back and get new ones. Allegedly, the right-size ones are on their way and we will be able to get cooking! We have two quite promising cooks now, we’re hiring the rest of our breakfast staff, our menu is – Whoa! This just in: Elmer’s now has groceries! Not many groceries, mind you, but some! We just got our first order in a few minutes ago and so we now carry: Bulk Herbs and Spices Juices and Soy Milks Bulk coffee Teas Local Syrup and Local Honey Healthier-than-candy Snacks I think it’s kind of thrilling after the long dark years of Elmer’s being empty. Of course we will get much more in as we go, but we have a beginning! --and where was I? Appliances. And menus. We have a menu. We’ve got just about every darn thing we need for a kitchen but appliances. Last weekend we had another big Irish Music Fest in honor of St. Patrick’s Day and in honor of the fact that we like having live music at Elmer’s—or at The Tin Pony, as I’m thinking of calling it when we have Live Music Fests. That local Celtic rock star Manfred Gabriel and his Growing Band of Irish Session Musicians played as background for Celtic Heels; an Irish dance group out of Shelburne Falls and Greenfield. Those girls kicked up their Celtic Heels and got the crowd to tapping and clapping so much that items were pitched from the shelves in the apartments above! What a day! What fun! It was wonderful to see whole families and whole individuals of all kinds of ages there. In the middle of the festivities Kermit Dunkelberg just got right up and sang an Irish ballad—with the accent and everything, all by himself, acapella. Oh the crowd went wild at that! It was like an old movie, in which all the local townspeople are impossibly talented and just get up and join in and it all sounds so great and the whole town is there having fun instead of sitting home watching television like they do in the big modern cities of today. Manfred and his band will become a regular staple of music on the last Saturday of every month at the Tin Pony here in the heart of downtown Ashfield. If we only had appliances, we’d have breakfast there, too. We’re still working on the back half of the building. The big orange wall that splits the building in two is just temporary while we do renovation in the back. At some point (I’d say in May) that wall will come down and we will have all of Elmer’s back as one big store with lots of groceries and local crafts and breakfast (I’m not just making the breakfast up!) and a good time to be had by all. Appliances. I can see them. I have spec sheets on them. I have put down a deposit on them. Perhaps soon, I will have them in my new pretty kitchen with the yellow and red-checkered floor. I believe in my heart that I will. And when I do, you will be the first to know. We will send out a whoop and a holler and hang banners on the front of our building. Elmer’s, as a full-time place to hang out and eat breakfast and proudly take its place again among the town’s other fine businesses will be back in full swing. And that, even more than the arrival of appliances is something I can hardly wait for! |
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December 2006 Now, you are going to say, “Well of course you think this way! You own a freakin’ small store!” But hear me out here! I’ve been doing some reading, some listening and some lecture-attending and I’ve found a few things out. Way back before Elmer’s was even a gleam in my entrepreneurial eye, I used to wonder if it was just my reactionary imagination, or were the downtowns of small communities disappearing in the wakes of the large, one-stop shopping big box stores? In the recent studying up on things I’ve been doing, I have learned: From every dollar spent at a business that is based some place else, 13% of that dollar stays in town and 87% of it goes back to the home state of that store. From every dollar spent at a local store or restaurant, 45% of the dollar stays in the community. Considering how much merchandise we at Elmer’s, Neighbors and Ashfield Hardware try to stock from local farmers, craftsmen and producers, I’ll bet the percentage of money that stays in our community is even higher than 45 percent. When you shop at Elmer’s or Neighbors or the Ashfield Hardware Store, we use your money to 1. Buy from local farmers, growers and product manufacturers 2. Eat at the Lakehouse and Country Pie, further supporting local workers who don’t even work for us 3. Hire local, independent carpenters, plumbers and electricians who further support local supply houses 4. Pay Ashfield property taxes and water bills which helps all of us to have services and water. 5. And more stuff that I haven’t even thought of yet. We even shop from each other, which keeps the money even closer to us in an expanding sort of way. “But Wal-mart is so cheap!” I hear you say. “How do you argue with that?” Well sir, I’m going to talk about quality of merchandise, integrity of shop owners, a small-town way of life and the big picture of where the money needs to stay in order for a small town to prosper. We here at Elmer’s, Neighbors and the Hardware Store have to live with our business decisions. If we try to sell you crap, we still have to look you in the eye every day we see you on the street. It is in our strongest interest to sell you quality food and merchandise, order what you want to buy and keep you happy. Those Who Will Never See You Again and who have millions of customers from all over the country may not care so much about one town’s immediate needs. From a social and soul-enlivening point of view, shopping local keeps choices available. I, myself kind of love that going to the hardware store takes me an extra fifteen minutes because I have to see what new ice cream flavors are available, pet the cat, discuss politics with Nancy, speak French with Laura, visit with Ruth and Clayton by the fire, play with the new toys, meet and hire someone who’s looking for a job, find the perfect door pull I’m looking for, put the door pull on Elmer’s tab and then go next door for a slice of pizza and a discussion of musical theater with Patrick. See, you don’t get that at Wal-mart because they don’t have cats to pet. Nor do they have Ruth and Clayton nor time to talk, nor a fireplace, nor an opinion on either local politics or musical theater. They may have pizza and door pulls, but the pizza comes from Frozen and the door pulls are all the way in the back and no one working there knows anything about them. Between the door pulls and the door itself lies miles of stuff I don’t need or necessarily want, but which will call my name and I will spend $200 dollars on my credit card that will ultimately cost me $400 with interest for a $9 door pull. (Plus gas.) Small-time local stores have a hard time competing with the lure of “cheap prices.” We can’t order the quantity that the large stores do and so we don’t get the cheapest prices the way the huge guys do. I am not saying that one should never shop at Wal-mart or Target; I, myself have been known to spend many hundreds of dollars in a single shopping trip at Target. But only recently did I realize that for every hundred dollars I left at Target, thirteen dollars stayed in my community, while eighty-seven dollars flew off to Minneapolis! Now, some of my favorite cooks and coffee-servers come from Minneapolis, but I have to pay them here in Massachusetts! Better I should shop at Wilson’s and keep the money circulating in the towns I love best! “But we have only a few stores here in Ashfield!” I hear you saying. (You and I have long conversations when you’re not even with me!) And indeed, Grasshopper, that is true! But we do have Wilson’s and other independent stores in Greenfield. “But Wilson’s is so expensive!” you say, biting into a banana. “Then you do not go to Wilson’s often enough!” I say back, wondering where you got that banana, because I want one too. Wilson’s is continually having in-house sales—really, really good sales that make their merchandise infinitely affordable to the common man. “But Wilson’s has stuff for my grandma—I want hip clothing!” You retort, with your mouth full. “Indeed, once again, you are not looking, Grasshopper!” I reply, frowning at your bad table manners. I buy many, many clothes at Wilson’s, clothing which is often praised by others, to which I always say, “I got it at Wilson’s!” And you always say, “I didn’t know Wilson’s had stuff like that!” But they do! And they, like Elmer’s want very much to hear from you about what kinds of things you want to buy. Wilson’s is the last of its kind—an independent, non-chain, family-run department store. Wilson’s is the real thing. It’s what other stores in America spend millions trying to be: authentic. It’s a national treasure! If we don’t shop there and if it closes, all the preservationists among us will wail and weep and lament the loss of the store we used to go to as kids. ------Hey! We could shop there, keep it open and keep our money in our community! We have power! Small towns around the rest of the country are rapidly becoming mere bedroom communities to the bigger cities because they have no Local Stores of their own. We are so very, very lucky here to have our small-time stores and restaurants. It’s part of what keeps Western Massachusetts interesting. If you have no interest in any of this and feel it’s just a dog-eat-dog world and you can’t stop progress, then, well, okay. I’m not trying to convince you to completely stop shopping at the big box stores; I’m trying to present the reality of community and what happens when people abandon it. “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!” you exclaim, “This isn’t a funny column at all!” To which I say, “The part about the banana was funny! The rest of it is very serious!” Keep us all vibrant by shopping the small and independent stores of Ashfield, Shelburne Falls, Greenfield and surrounding areas first, and if you can’t find what you need, branch out. And just do a little research on the subject of the Small-Mart revolution. It gets into all kinds of deeper issues like how shopping locally keeps food safer (buying local beef and chickens helps guard against meat carrying Mad-cow disease and avian flu) and how de-centralizing production keeps us safer in times of 9/11 types of crises. It’s really kind of exciting to know that we can take all of this back into our own hands! Which brings us back to: “Of course you think this way! You own a freakin’ small store!” And it’s a small, local store whose sole focus is on the needs and wants of one particular small community . . . You know, you don’t get that just everywhere. . . |
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